Chandra Announcement: Update on HRC Anomaly

[Tara Gokas]

Following several months of effort by the flight and science operations teams, the first scheduled HRC observation in more than a year occurred on the morning of Monday, April 10th. As you all know, the hiatus in HRC observations followed a failure of the instrument’s B-side 15 volt low voltage power supply (LVPS) in February 2022. The initial observation was a Director’s Discretionary Time request to observe the host star of the recently discovered exoplanet system TIC 420112589 (Principal Investigator: Poppenhaeger). The HRC teams evaluated the quality of the science and engineering data from the observation and determined that the instrument operated nominally for the entire 10 ks observation. In particular, the 15V LVPS voltages remained within their operational limits, and the temperature of the HRC’s power supply box remained below its planning limit of 10C. Additionally, the teams note that the detector gain is currently at or near the level it was at prior to the February 2022 anomaly.

The Chandra long-term scheduled has been updated to once again include HRC targets, with an emphasis on completing those from Cycles 22 and 23